Tuesday, August 6, 2013

The Humans Who Went Extinct

Clive Finlayson is an evolutionary ecologist and a champion
skeptic.He routinely rejects theories
based on no evidence, even if they are solidly supported by popular whims, like
the widely held belief in the inferiority of Neanderthals.What science now knows about human evolution
is something like finding 100 pieces of a 10,000-piece puzzle.

Experts have a strong urge to fill in the blanks with their opinionated
imaginations, an approach that is far from trusty.The mindset of mainstream modern science
worships Homo sapiens
like Hitler worshipped Aryans — the master race — whilst the holy species rips
the planet to shreds right before their eyes.For 300,000 years, Neanderthals had the good manners to remain in
balance with life, as did most of our ancestors.Good manners are important.

The whims of Ice Age climate patterns are the primary reason
why you and I are not gorgeous, sexy, brilliant Neanderthals today, admiring a
passing group of wooly rhinos, in a healthy world where bison far outnumber
people.Finlayson’s book, The Humans Who Went Extinct,
convinced me to reconsider my perception of the human journey.Not many books do that anymore.

The era we live in, the 10,000 years of civilization, human
domination, and ecocide, is but an eye blink in the long human journey.Our era is a freak, because the climate has
remained relatively warm and stable for an amazingly long time.The pattern of the last 70,000 years has been
a roller coaster of surprising climate shifts, from milder & wetter, to
colder & drier.Shifts could occur
within a single lifetime.

When the glaciers grew, sea levels plunged, forests shrank,
countless animals died, and some went extinct.The deer and hippos fled or died, and were replaced by wooly mammoths,
wooly rhinos, musk ox, and reindeer. Sea
levels 30,000 years ago were 120 meters (400 feet) lower than today.You could walk from England to Holland.

The Younger Dryas cold snap lasted a thousand years, and
ended 11,600 years ago.Warm weather
melted the glaciers, life migrated northward, forests returned, and the land
was filled with abundant megafauna.This
was the last waltz for many cold-tolerant megafauna.The breezes were filled with the yummy aroma of
sizzling mammoth meat.

In the Middle East, the Natufian culture was developing a
sedentary way of life that majored in harvesting the abundant wild cereal
seeds.Within a thousand years, folks
were experimenting with the dangerous juju of cultivation.Tragically, they could never begin to imagine
the unintended consequences of their cleverness.

Many have pointed to agriculture as the father of our
disaster.Lately, I’ve been more
inclined to point to tool addiction.Hominids were able to move out of the forests and survive. The savannah offered immense amounts of meat,
but acquiring it with bare hands was not easy

Once you get started with innovation, is it possible to
stop?Yes. The macaques of south Asia break open
shellfish with stone axes — they have been tool addicts for ages, but their
excellent manners and beautiful small brains protected them from being flushed
down the toilet by the Technology Fairy.

The ancestors of the chimps evolved large canine teeth for
dining on meat, whilst early hominids developed meat-processing tools
instead.Baboons hunt small animals
without weapons.Tool-free small-brained
monkeys of the American tropics eat a wide variety of jungle critters.

Could large-brained humans ever comprehend the healthy
consequences of living tool-free, like the monkeys?There is something deliciously appealing
about the notion of living in harmony for millions of years without psych meds
and cell phones.

And now, the plot thickens.The Ice Ages did not hammer Africa, Australia, or India.These southern folks continued living in the
traditional human manner, as low density, low impact hunter-gatherers.Northerners, on the other hand, stumbled onto
a new and dangerous path.

Almost everyone has seen an image of the Venus of Willendorf.She was carved by a member of the Gravettian
culture of early humans, which thrived across the chilly treeless plains of
Europe, from 30,000 to 22,000 years ago.They were clever folks who loved reindeer stew.They lived in huts with frames made of
mammoth bones, covered with hides.They
made textiles, baskets, kilns, jewelry, and figurines.They painted the caves at Chauvet and Les
Garennes.

Finlayson laments that we modern civilized folks suffer to
this very day from the curse of the Gravettians, “who lost their own way and
all sense of their Pleistocene heritage.”It was these far-too-clever white folks who created the most diabolical
invention of all time — (gasp!) the storage pit.

Southern folks enjoyed a warm climate, and a year-round food
supply.Most foods could not be stored,
because they would soon spoil.The crazy
Gravettians lived in a frigid climate, where all you could see in any direction
was endless empty steppe-tundra.Food
appeared occasionally, like when migrating herds of reindeer passed
through.When they did, the Gravettians
hunted like crazy, and stored surplus meat in pits that they had dug in the
permafrost.

Finlayson referred to these pits as dangerous toys.“They had found ways of producing surplus,
something almost impossible in warm climates, and with it emerged an
unstoppable drive to increase rapidly in numbers.”If some surplus was good, then more was
better, and you could never have too much.Abundant food led to growing numbers and bad manners.Finlayson emphasizes that our nightmare
actually began 30,000 years ago, and agriculture was merely its hideous
grandchild.

Later, the weather warmed, and the megafauna were gone.Descendants of the Gravettians tried hunting
small game for a while.They learned how
to enslave herbivores, which led to domestication.Instead of storing meat in storage pits, they
stored living critters in grassy prisons.Others began growing plants for food, and storing the harvest in
granaries.By and by, ecosystems fell
under human control.Agriculture opened
the floodgates to explosive population growth.We embarked on an insane vision of “taming the future.”

Countless cultures and species were blown off the stage by
climate shifts.Finlayson insists that
luck may be the most important factor in the evolutionary process.Oddly, if luck had made Neanderthals the
winners, and they had the good manners not to invent psych meds and cell
phones, and the world of today was an incredible paradise — we’d still be long
overdue for a turbulent climate shift.

Reading this book, I was impressed by the incredible
resilience of life.Over and over again,
forest ecosystems were wiped out and replaced with treeless ecosystems that
later changed back to forest ecosystems.Countless species disappeared in this exciting tilt-a-whirl ride of
climate shifts, and countless species adapted and evolved.Our ancestors nearly died out 73,500 years
ago, following the Mount Toba eruption.A few thousand survived.Today
we’re at seven-point-something billion.

This is a small book, but it is jammed with information.We really can’t know who we are, and where we
came from, if we don’t understand the turbulent sagas of the Ice Ages.The end of our entire way of life is just a
climate shift away.In the past, it was
a zigzag between cold and warm.Future
zigzags seem likely to be between warm and roasting.Hang on to yer arses, and the best of luck to
ye!

Finlayson, Clive, The
Humans Who Went Extinct — Why Neanderthals Died Out And We Survived,
Oxford University Press, New York, 2009.

2 comments:

Anonymous
said...

i reccomend you watch First Footprints, 4 part doco on Aboriginal Australians who were not hunter gatherers but had a sophisticated way of working with nature for food and ecological conservation, for the last 60,000 years.